Designing and evaluating an online course to support transition to university mathematics

We describe the design and evaluation of an innovative course for beginning undergraduate mathematics students. The course is delivered almost entirely online, making extensive use of computer-aided assessment to provide students with practice problems. We outline various ideas from education research that informed the design of the course, and describe how these are put into practice. We present quantitative evaluation of the impact on students' subsequent performance (N = 1401), as well as qualitative analysis of interviews with a sample of 14 students who took the course. We find evidence that the course has helped to reduce an attainment gap among incoming students, and suggest that the design ideas could be applied more widely to other courses.